Is it time to switch them out?

Talent mentors are there for a season and then you must keep moving forward

Listen in to a conversation between my wife and me as we discuss why and how often you should try switching mentors, teachers, and learning experiences. There are benefits to moving on from a mentor, no matter how excellent that person may be in his or her skill. Here are four indicators that it’s time to move on:

your child has learned everything he can and he needs more from another mentor in order to keep his talent relevant to the needs of other people.

you are in charge of who you choose as a mentor. If the mentor’s personal life is complicating the value he once brought to your child, it may be time to move on.

you can free the mentor of having to be responsible for full-on character training for your child. This opens the door to recruiting new mentors who want a specific, limited role.

it’s time to get out of your (and your child’s) comfort zone and be stretched with developing a new area of his talent.

This up-front “fun” is powered in the background by the administrative efforts of my son Nicholas, who is 13 years old. This is an example of how to use a fun popular tool to gain real experience that will add valuable hours to a 10,000 hour talent journey.

Can a gaming hobby, such as Minecraft, be turned into a real long-term talent? Yes, it can be! But you must re-cast the interest in a way that focuses on bringing value to others. When you switch from doing a skill for just your own enjoyment, to doing a skill so that it brings real value to other people, you transform the low-value hobby into a market valuable talent.

I discuss with my wife Renee about how we have been successfully able to turn one of our children’s talent into a potential for real long term talent.

How do you use an Instagram account so that your talent focused young person can connect with other talented young people? There is an easy straight-forward way to do it and we tell you how to approach Instagram with the right mindset. It’s the smart way to use your smart phone.

My wife and I discuss two recent Instagram examples that helped our two oldest boys to a community of very talented people.

At the end of this episode, we finish with this call-to-action:

Create an Instagram account to search for ideas on how the world of your child’s talent could be showcased so that other talented people will want to connect with your son or daughter.

Welcome to the very first podcast by Jonathan Harris discussing talent development in children. Listen to a conversation between me and my wife, Renee, as we discuss why it is that so many parents will overlook the hidden assets in their life in favor of staying average.

How does a young person find the motivational energy to commit himself around one theme long enough that it changes his life? What if talent is a process that can be ignited by primal cues?

Here is what Daniel Coyle says:

Why was Tom Sawyer able to persuade Ben to help him whitewash the fence? The answer is that Tom flung primal cues at Ben with the speed and accuracy of a circus knife-thrower.

In the space of a few sentences, he managed to hit bull’s-eyes of exclusivity (“ All I know is, it suits Tom Sawyer … I reckon there ain’t one boy in a thousand …”) and scarcity (“ Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day? … Aunt Polly’s awful particular about this fence”).

His gestures and body language echoed the same messages.

If Tom had only sent one or two of these signals, or if they’d been spaced over the course of a leisurely hour, his cues would have had no effect; Ben’s trigger would have remained untouched. But the rich combination of cues, peppering Ben’s ignition switch one after another, succeeded in cracking open his vault of motivational energy.

The author noticed that hotbeds of talent did NOT appear randomly across a cultural landscape as you would expect if something were genetically popping up here and there through the population. The creation of clusters of talented people (aka “hotbeds”) appear instead to be triggered entirely by behavior, even in reaction to other people’s behaviors. One of those behavioral factors that seems to play a big role is the often, out-of-ordinary attitude of the adult mentors involved in those hotbeds of motivation.

As the author spoke to the people in such hotbeds of talent, interacting with both the children and their teachers, he noticed that the young people were being talked to by their adult mentors in a special way. The adults in these children’s lives spoke in the high language of prizing, scarcity, and exclusivity.

You can find a demonstration of that prizing language in the beloved “Tom Sawyer,” the quintessential boy’s adventure story. A well-known, amusing fence-painting passage in Tom Sawyer perfectly distills the type of conversations Mr. Coyle overheard in such hotbeds of motivation and talent.

The adults that Daniel Coyle observed in those super-talented contexts communicated through their words and their body language a very clear message: we we are not embarked on a quest for mediocrity and look-alike performance, but we are embarked on a special quest for excellence that has great value.

What the author of “The Talent Code” says he observed makes sense to me. I believe that children are in fact primed to be able to accept and assimilate the values of their elders, especially their parents.

In practice, what the elders value little, the children also tend to value little. What the elders and mentors value much, the children also tend to value very much. Of course, as the children grow up, that ability to be influenced with such basic primal cues of encouragement and direction by their elders lessens over time. That is as it should be as it gives the children room to grow into their decision-making abilities.

The application of this understanding of primal cues means that when people are young, it is an opportunity for parents with high aspirations to deliberately jump-start their children onto a higher track in life. You can “crack open their vault of motivational energy”, as Daniel Coyle puts it so directly.

Here is why it is better to crack that vault now while your son is still under your roof. As your child crosses over into adulthood and leaves your home, he can certainly learn to find causes for motivation on his own terms, even into his late thirties. But unless you yourself experienced an usually prosperous and easy entry into your work life, I don’t think you would wish that your young person have to go through the same experiences you did.

Here’s the danger to avoid: if you wait for your young person to find it on his own, he will most likely miss that crucial lift-off phase that allows him to escape years of being bogged down by pursuits and jobs that do little to nothing to build amazing talent. The benefits of finding an early, fiery motivation will allow him to reap huge benefits in his early adulthood. Talented young men, instead of serving before obscure people, will be called up to serve before kings. (Proverbs 22: 29)

Parents, do not let that opportunity escape you to unlock the vault of their motivation. Start talking today the language of prizing, scarcity, and exclusivity with your child.

“The benefits of deliberate practice are that we perceive more, know more, and remember more in a specific domain of knowledge that we have chosen. This makes us more aware of our uniqueness as well as the uniqueness in others. The [Talent is Overrated] book suggests that over time we develop mental models of how our domain functions as a system.

As a result, we connect with every day events not as an isolated bit of data but as part of a large and comprehensive picture.”

I agree with this reader’s comment. The earlier your teenage son or daughter can find a way to focus around a long term talent, the more amazingly easy it is for him to succeed at what he wants to do.

This is because he is not learning one hour here in this subject and one hour over there in that subject. In a person without a specific talent focus, those are two disconnected work hours of his life spent learning various factoids pulled from two different domains of knowledge, but having little-to-no benefit of bringing added-value to each domain.

This is the ideal: each new hour of learning in one domain is an hour that can be counted on to augment the value in another domain. It is a type of compounding effect.

Example: a 15 year old young man has a passion for flying and has easy access to training hours because of a good pilot friend of the family.

He discovers through the chatter from other pilots that there is growing demand for paid flight instructors on American soil to teach the future pilots from China and Japan (true story!). He hears that this new and growing demand is coming from the commercial airlines in those countries who prefer to have their people trained here. The English language and culture for communicating between pilots is the preferred common ground. This is creating opportunities for young pilots to start early careers.

As his pilot training increases, he then realizes that his love for the science of aeronautics is growing. This causes him to sign up for a special online course that will help him take a college level examination course in aeronautics.

I will stop at this point in the example, as I think you have now gotten the point.

Here is three by-products of pursuing talent on your young person’s mental health:

Listen to the point in the interview she makes about how it was not until she was in her late twenties that she finally started a learning journey of her own that made sense to the vision for her own life. How much better it would have been if she had had a method that could have started her in her teens. Enter “yours truly”, to explain a strategy of how that can be accomplished much sooner rather than much later.

Wardee asks me how I would approach talent in a young person’s life if the interest was already there for traditional cooking or homesteading. Her podcast audience has a shared interest for real food and traditional cooking so it would be natural for the children of her listeners to also have grown up with a passion for growing food, fermenting food, or cooking food in a traditional way. Does such an early interest mean something to son or daughter’s future opportunities? or is it neither here nor there? This was a great how-to-create-talent interview because she wanted me to explain how do you turn such a type of interest and passion into eventually an opportunity that can support a family. And that’s what I take the time to clearly explain.

Your child’s core skill, such the ability to grow a Victory garden, can be used as the first skill around which to wrap many others until it gets transformed into a market valuable talent.

in seven weeks, most students will learn a year’s worth of material, an increase of about 500 percent in learning speed. Among the students, this acceleration is well known but only dimly understood…

These feats are routine…

The goal is always the same: to break a skill into its component pieces (circuits), memorize those pieces individually, then link them together in progressively larger groupings…

Through practice, they had developed something more important than mere skill; they’d grown a detailed conceptual understanding that allowed them to control and adapt their performance, to fix problems, and to customize their circuits to new situations. They were thinking in chunks and had built those chunks into a private language of skill…

Being self-aware of how one is learning accelerates talent growth. Good coaches and good mentors can help teach awareness. And parents, especially parents, can cultivate that awareness at an early age. Awareness can also be deliberately developed by the young person himself as he gets older, but why leave it for him to find out on his own at a much later age?

If your child becomes self-aware about how and why he is able to learn, he can then accelerate his progress in his chosen area of talent. He learns how to decompose the actual learning process itself so that he doesn’t have to keep increasing the sheer number of brute working hours. By understanding how to change strategy or technique along the way, you will be giving your young person the mental tools to take control of the direction and speed of his learning.

Parents, think carefully: are you actively encouraging that mindset or are you letting the outline of a textbook dictate the best strategy for making progress?

I take advantage of opportunities in my community and through a network of my friends and family. I take advantage of opportunities to experience what I am learning.

I’m not afraid to look for shortcuts or hacks to get a better or faster result. It’s like a remix or a mash-up of learning: flexible, opportunistic,…

It’s a mindset, not a system.

I didn’t use to like to write because my teachers made me write about butterflies and rainbow and I wanted to write about skiing.

I got to write through my experiences and my interest while connecting with great speakers from around the nation. And that sparked my love for writing.

I realized that once you are motivated to lean something, you can get a lot done in a short amount of time and on your own.

Inspired me to one day have my own business

So I got an internship

Happy healthy creative

This is where I am really happy: Powder days. It’s a good metaphor for my life, my education, my hackschooling. If everyone skied this mountain like most people think of education, everyone would be skiing the same line, probably the safest and most of the powder would go untouched. I look at this and see a thousand possibilities…Skiing to me is freedom and so is my education. It’s about being creative, doing things differently…among my very best friends.

For some parents, the real educational goal for their child may be to simply marry well or to avoid military enrollment as a last resort. For other parents, the real goal may be produce a son who becomes a successful entrepreneur rather than an employee. Or it may be to produce a daughter who is unusually proficient in the ministry of hospitality.

However, whichever of the many underlying reasons, many parents will still choose just one particular learning curriculum, very often a default MacGuffin goal of using that curriculum for getting into college for a liberal arts degree. In some cases it is not a mistake, when the goal is clearly understood.

But in general, a one size fits all solution is a mistake: a MacGuffin can be a very inefficient, expensive, and round-about way to achieving any of those examples mentioned earlier. Usually there is a much more efficient way to meet your true goals for your young person, assuming you know what your true goals are in the first place. So if you are not afraid, do a MacGyver with your child’s textbooks and homework assignments.

This last minute opportunity turned out to be a rather fun assignment for him as it involved a swordfish, jet-subs, hanging out with inventors, and getting a joy ride as part of being with the crew (can you spot him half way through the promotional video?). In the short Facebook clip below, you can see the work he did as all the aerial parts of it were done by him.

Having a real reason to write can make all the difference for some young people. One of the best places to write with a purpose is on a blog.

We had an educational failure recently. It was not a big failure, but it reminded us to stay alert as parents. We had to stop an English writing course designed for middle-schoolers from causing any more consternation in our family. It was a great course as far as the content went, but it was putting our middle-school daughter way behind in the goals we wanted for her.

Here is the background on how we originally came to choose that course. My wife chose a company whose English curriculum had produced results for us in the past. Their high-school curriculum set aside the traditional approach of the five paragraph essay or the research paper and focused on a method that produced young people who were able to write original novels. As a matter of fact, we are still using their high-school course for young writers for one of our teenage boys. Then entered a particular need for one of my middle children.

My 13-year-old daughter has had great difficulty over the years in learning at the same pace as her brothers in the realm of reading and writing, no matter which method we tried (although we had found one approach that did allow her to make some progress). Around the age of eleven she suddenly seemed to finally discover some ease from her difficulties. Hurray! We rejoiced with her. Her old limitations were starting to disappear. Whatever the root cause, we then decided that maybe we could get a middle-school course for writing in order to catch her up to what most peers her age were able to do with writing. So when that company recently put out a systematic writing curriculum for middle-schoolers, we decided that it might be worth a try for just that particular child.

Within a month of use, we realized that experiment of using a traditional course was a complete failure for our daughter. Suddenly, we were back to the tears, confusion, frustration and constant parental hand-holding. The check list of things to know and things to do that you would expect in a traditional textbook were all in this course. Sure, it was wrapped in a better-than-average presentation format, but in the end, it fell far short of the ground breaking innovation that the high school English writing course had put out. Not wanting to admit at first that we made a mistake, we delayed a bit before making the decision that needed to be made. We swallowed our pride and cold-stopped the course, without any transition. We went back to the tried and true that has worked in our family.

With her brothers, we had, and still do, use blogs, writing e-books, and other public writing mediums to practice communicating clearly with regards to a talent focus or a specific interest. So that is the same method to which we decided to set her. Within days of switching to writing through a talent focus, my daughter was a happy learner again. Suddenly, my daughter was smiling again and writing like a maniac. It was as if someone had flipped on a switch. Now she has something she wants to say in her writing. She wants to know how to say it even better and is open to all sorts of writing corrections – and then understands the principle behind the corrections she is given!

Moral of the story: writing with a purpose has the power to overcome many weaknesses and psychological hangups. That purpose can be found in having your young person share his or her talent interest with the world.

From chapter eight in the book “The Talent Code”, the author talks about the amazing people behind the creation of some of the most talented people in the world. Very often there are those individuals around talented people who are best described as “talent whisperers.” Those whisperers know how to identify so closely with the needs and personality of a young person that they can coach and coax them to the next level of performance; they know how to be tough and tender, cold and hot, as the need arises. They are intensely interested in the talent and in the person trying to become better in that field of human endeavor.

Interestingly, a talent whisperer is not necessarily the same person through the various stages of expertise. Sometimes a beginner needs more of one type and style of coaching than when he does later on when he is operating at a much more complex level. That is one of the reasons why I tap into different experts over time to help my own children’s talents. (Another reason is because a marketable talent should not be made up of one type of skill that can be learned from one expert). When it comes to custom talent, one that does not have an easy title set to it, I recognize that I have a special advantage as a parent to help guide my son or daughter. For someone else other than the parent, it can be a risky endeavor to accurately judge the character and emotional maturity of a young person. But I have inside knowledge on how ready my own child is. I act as the “talent whisperer” within our family, even though the specific skills are often learned from someone outside our household.

For example, I know that for my thirteen year old daughter to transition out of one learning context into another, it can sometimes be a tricky maneuver. That is an almost impossible task to do for a 13 year old girl without risking offending and alienating those who have already helped her along the way. As the other resident household “talent whisperer”, my wife will insert herself into our daughter’s talent journey and closely guide the transition process. If the expert teachers and mentors are self-aware of their role, they will themselves gently give you the cue that it is time for your 13 year old to find another mentor. Many times though you don’t have the luxury of choosing such self-aware mentors and it is imperative to move forward, regardless of sensibilities. That’s when dad or mom can save the day.

Either way, gladly accept that there are various learning seasons in life for your child. Embrace your “talent whispering” persona realizing you are critical to a smooth progress. If she is transitioning then that means she is in fact growing! It is thanks to you that she is beginning to catch her own vision.

How am I turning my family into a hotbed of talent for all of my children?

Here’s how:

I talk the talent language every day with my children: have you done some talent building today? what did you learn? what was hard? what was fun? Can you do it differently? Have you asked an expert about how to better get around the problem? Don’t give up, you can do it. Tell me more. Try it a different way. Do it again. I’m proud of you for not stopping. You did good work today.

– But most adults will never talk like that to a young person.

I behave in a way that my children are convinced that I want them to have a real talent to carry into adulthood more than I want them to simply sound smart and educated.

– But most adults do not believe it is possible for their children to develop real talent, so they settle for being generally educated.

I re-arrange the school schedule so that it supports time for building talent. I say ‘no’ frequently to activities that are otherwise good, but not helpful to making progress.

– But most adults will never allow the pursuit of excellence to override a formal school schedule.

I watch how others succeed in one area or another with their children. I borrow the pieces of their methods and techniques that were good and apply them so that it fits my household. I’m always alert and receptive to someone else’s great idea.

– But most adults never ask questions of how it is done from those who are already very successful.

I make note of how others fail to launch their children and study the details of their failures. I then work it backwards until I find a different path so the same problems do not crop up in my household.

– But most adults will assume that if the hand of fate has failed their friends then they are convinced they are also meant to also fail rather than to do things differently.

I believe that almost every educational method can be improved. So everywhere I look I see possibilities for new and better ways for learning and teaching. I keep trying new things with the expectation that it gets better with time, not worse.

– But most adults hope that their children will repeat the same educational experience they had, down to eagerly discussing how they will repeat the same painful social experiences.

“Coaching is a long, intimate conversation, a series of signals and responses that move toward a shared goal. A coach’s true skill consists not in some universally applicable wisdom that he can communicate to all, but rather in the supple ability to locate the sweet spot on the edge of each individual student’s ability, and to send the right signals to help the student reach toward the right goal, over and over.”

When we speak of coaching, it is normally referring to someone who is helping your young person get good at one or more of the particular skills that make up his talent. He’s the man on the sidelines who gives encouragement and direction. He’s also the one that knows how to blow that whistle when there is too much playing around and not enough focus. But with the idea of the traditional coaching, I think we should include the parent who has a conscious desire to act on behalf of his child.

The “coach” parent acts on behalf of his child to create the strategy and the conditions in his life that makes the pursuit of talent possible. That parent may not how to teach a particular skill, but he knows to find the coach who does. That would be you, dear reader. That parent coaches his son or daughter to appropriately manage all the other important aspects of his life in a balanced way. He’s also there to make sure the talent doesn’t inadvertently destroy the rest of the child’s life outside of his talent pursuit (health, marriage, etc.). The coach parent recognizes the edge where the sweet spot is.

The alternative to being a “coach” parent is to simply let a boxed curriculum tell you what your son or daughter will doing on a daily basis, in the same way as it is telling a thousand other children to do on the same day for the same age. As the coach in your child’s life, you can avoid his fate of looking like those thousand other children. As the coach you tell the curriculum when and how much of it can be used. As the coach, you can and should use your whistle on any curriculum that oversteps its bounds.

Driving your child to and from locations is an opportunity to talk on regular basis with your child away from the hubbub of family life at home. This tip is given to me by another homeschooling Dad, Will G., as an additional benefit of engaging in the to-and-fro of mini-talent mentoring relationships with people outside of your household. Your child is going to be relaxed and will enjoy your transportation company as a way to converse with you about all sorts of topics at his own rhythm and pace.

If you start early, at age 12 for example, you will have several solid years of pleasant, edifying, and bonding conversations before he reaches the age of 18. Instead of growing apart, you will be growing closer together in the teenage years.

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Ten Thousand Hours

The 10,000-hours rule is the principle that it takes 10,000 hours of concerted focus, training, and learning in order to become one of the world’s best within a specific field of human activity.

It is a rule-of-thumb could also be expressed as saying it takes about ten years of dedication with 4 hours of daily training to become great in your talent. Ten years of that regimen will place you among the top ten people in the world who are doing the same thing you are doing.

10ktotalent is the 10,000-hour rule as applied to children. It's about crafting a custom strategy for your child so he can find something specific and early enough around which he can focus the many hours needed to achieve lift-off. 10ktotalent also teaches you how to turn a beginning talent into something that will make sense to your child’s adult life.